AppScale 3.1 : Take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Platform

We are pleased to announce the release of AppScale 3.1, the second release of the 3 series.

Notable in this release are the addition of the Azure agent (in general Beta) and the Pull Queues. With the addition of the Azure agent, AppScale users will be able to take full advantage of the Microsoft Azure platform, and enjoy the full autoscaling capabilities of their App Engine application.

We have added Pull Queues to the TaskQueue API puzzle. They are now available in pre-Beta with AppScale 3.1, as we are finishing off our Java support. If Python or REST API are more up your alley, go give them a try and send us your feedback! We are confident they'll meet your expectations.

In this release, you will also find a few more improvements and bug fixes, ranging from expanded cron format support, to more robust handling of options in the AppScalefile and in the application configuration files (app.yaml, appengine-web.xml, etc.). These improvements lay the the foundation for the upcoming changes in the way AppScale is deployed, which will drastically simplify AppScale’s configuration.

More detailed list of changes:

Added support for using Azure as an infrastructure

Added preliminary support for pull queues

Added support for more cron formats

Changed the dashboard, allowing it to be treated like a normal application

Added flexibility to the Java queue configuration parsing process

Upgraded Cassandra to 2.2.7

Made large batch statements and transactions more reliable

Fixed a bug that prevented multiple dashboard AppServers from running

Fixed a bug that caused instability when min was undefined

Fixed a bug that prevented the dashboard from deploying an application